Well it is that time again when E3 is upon us and we kick things off with press conferences. In past years we have done a play by play recap but given that the press conferences were live streamed and you can see clips at will I decided that this year’s coverage of the conferences we were invited to would just be our impressions of what we saw and what was most interesting to us. And when I say ‘us’ I mean ‘me’ because I am the only one who came this year. I will throw some trailers and clips below so you can check it out for yourself if you didn’t see a live stream and don’t want to hunt it down piecemeal.

Going into the Xbox press briefing I wasn’t really sure what to expect in terms of announcements and featured games. I thought we would see some Fable Legends stuff and Halo Guardians with a bit of Tomb Raider and I was right, those were all there but it was some of the stuff I wasn’t expecting that got me the most excited.

Right off the bat I have to talk about the backwards compatibility with Xbox 360 titles. This took me by surprise as I assumed that would just never happen and it has never been mentioned as even a potential feature in the past. On top of that I never thought it would include physical copies of games. Digital makes sense but I never would have thought discs would work. Right now we get 100 games with more coming. On top of that, games purchase digitally will automatically show up on the Xbox One which is nuts and makes me realize I need to get an external hard drive stat because as inadequate as 500 gigs was before…holy shit.

Backward compatibility was great fucking news and it was the tip of the ice berg in terms of improvements on their way. First up they showed off the new Elite wireless controller for Xbox One. This thing looks pretty sweet with swappable buttons, a redesigned D-pad, trigger locks and some extra buttons on the underside of the controller. It looks slick and is hopefully more sturdy than the standard controller. I have not broken mine yet but it has way more give to it than I am strictly comfortable with. It looks kind of like a modern version of the NES Advantage in terms of some of the extra buttons and tweaks. I can’t imagine this will make competitive gamers happy if their opponent has a controller advantage but I am all for trying this out when it is released. The $149 price Amazon has listed for pre-order makes me a bit more hesitant though.

 

Microsoft also offered up some tweaks to it’s ID@Xbox program with a preview program that allows players to play games while they are being developed. There is a free trail for each game, which is nice but given that you are paying to beta test games for indy developers it feels a little manipulative. That being said, if you really want to play something early then you are good to go here and have a real voice in game development. It just all comes down to what you feel comfortable with and how much you want to be part of that process. Me personally, I am not that into it but whatever. It is great to have options for as many different tastes and interests as possible and I like that Microsoft is taking the line that they want to give people what they want instead of telling them what they will get and making them happy with that.

Speaking of indy games, there were several highlighted all of which looked interesting to one degree or another. I am really stoked about Cuphead as it looks crazy awesome. I am kind of bummed that it isn’t showing up until 2016 but it looks amazing. Tacoma looked intriguing and seemed to have a Bioshock mixed with Alien Isolation vibe going to it. Ashen also looked interesting and it seemed to have a bit of a Shadow of Colossus vibe but it was hard to tell on the short preview. I could be way off.

Getting to the main chunk of the conference, Microsoft showed a shit ton of games, many of which are platform or Microsoft exclusives. This is impressive because this generation is really going to be decided by the exclusives and Microsoft has a bit of ground to cover given the perceived power gap between the Xbox One and the PS4. I have both and I don’t want to get into a pissing contest about which is better but on the exclusives front I am much more excited by what Xbox is offering than Sony.

Halo 5 Guardians was the first thing they got to and, while I am not a big Halo Fan, it looks very promising. I love what 454 Studios did with Halo 4 an I am excited to see what they bring to the table with this one. They showed four player co-op which is pretty cool especially since the core game has two squads going through the campaign. One squad is led by Master Chief and the other is led by Spartan Locke. It looks like the new Spartans have some new abilities which should be nice to break up the action and differentiate your play experiences from one another.

They also showed a mode called Warzone in which it is PVP plus PVE so it is a little like Titan Fall except that the AI squads are not support troops for either side but are their own side. It looks pretty cool and should be a lot of fun to add variety to more standard multi-player modes. It also looks gorgeous.

Rise of the Tomb Raider looked pretty solid with a game play demo that showed an emphasis on survival and traversal. Shifting environmental conditions look to be a pretty big part of game play and how well you can make it around in a way not dissimilar to some aspects of the Uncharted series. Again this game looks beautiful which is to be expected this generation. Games are only going to look better and better.

Gears of War 4 was announced and shown and again it looks fantastic. The gameplay appears to be largely unchanged from past installments and not a ton was shown but the series is solid so I am not looking for a sea change here. I just want to chainsaw gun the fuck out of enemies and that appears to be intact so I am all good. I wish it were coming out sooner than holiday 2016 but that is how E3 goes. You get pumped for games that you have to wait for.

Ion, Recore and Gigantic all looked interesting to various degrees but not a ton was shown on them so my excitement is appropriately in check. Sea of Thieves looks pretty awesome and appears to be a pirate themed multi-player adventure game. That looks nice but again not a ton of details. There was a game, however, that got me super excited and that was Rare Replay which is a collection of 30 Rare titles including Perfect Dark, Banjo-Kazooie, Battletoads and Conker Bad Fur Day. This collection boasts 10,000 achievement points and is going to be available in August of 2015.

Probably the biggest deal shown at the Xbox Press Briefing was the demonstration of Minecraft played with the Microsoft HoloLens. This is a headset that projects holograms onto the world in front of you so you can control with your hands and voice commands. It was pretty crazy to see this in action. Utilizing a special camera images of what the developer playing the game saw on a screen and it looked like real next level business. I am not sure how many consumers are going to get their hands on this tech any time soon but it looks like straight up sci-fi technology.

Overall I was really impressed by what Microsoft had to offer this year and this was definitely the strongest Xbox press conference I have been to (it is the third so we aren’t talking about dozens or anything). I am very pleased to see that Microsoft is looking to improve the overall Xbox experience in a meaningful way and that they aren’t resting on their laurels. While the system got off to a rough start initially I think they are making great strides toward giving gamers the experience they want and I think if they can capitalize on that Microsoft will be in a great position. That I like their exclusives and find that their catalog is better than other systems definitely plays a part in how I feel about them as a company and how exciting their announcements were but I think you would be hard pressed to not have at least one thing to be excited for here. I am of the opinion that there is a ton to be excited for and there is going to be a lot of great stuff to play this year. Sound off in the comments with your take on the conference and the line up!